"What really brings history alive is when you can interact with it – when you can see it, feel it and touch it at places like museums and at historic monuments. However, many of us are tied to a computer three quarters of every day, and it’s hard to break loose to get out there and interact with history very often. There is some hope for you busy history-buffs though. In this article I’m going to share 6 really cool interactive websites that bring American history alive in ways that never would have been possible on the Internet a decade ago."

"To prepare for an unpredictable future, look beyond educations' familiar rhythms to encourage staff and student voice and agency, rule challengers, design thinkers, and leaders." "As I begin my tenth year as superintendent, I take stock of the significant changes that have occurred in my school district. As Pascal Finette says, social media have turned the world into a participation culture linked by a global communication network. And mobile devices, with 500 times the computing power that put astronauts on the moon, rest in the hands, pockets, and backpacks of children, not just top executives. Smart technologies have moved onto some college campuses, and students now receive texts telling them when washers are open for laundry. No longer science fiction, driverless vehicles represent real stories in our daily newsfeeds. • Yet even with all our knowledge about global changes, many U.S. schools have changed little while the world participates in the rising Age of Smart Machines. Who doubts that young people must be ready for a future in which they will be challenged by radical workforce evolution, global problems from environmental degradation to geopolitical instabilities, and demographic shifts redefining family, community, and culture? How do we prepare learners for that? Considering how to proactively respond inside the walls of schools to the exponential changes occurring outside those walls keeps me up at night."

With some 13,000 graduate schools of business across the globe, the M.B.A. degree has clearly become a commodity.

Even among elite schools, courses and case studies are pretty much water from the same well (i.e., finance, operations, marketing, accounting). So how do you choose? By using the rankings? Which ones? The Economist’s? Businessweek’s? The Financial Times’s? And if you do, how do you tell the difference between a school ranked No. 6 and a school ranked No. 7?

Don’t ask us. Don’t ask the schools, either. Their slick brochures try to be everything to everybody, and in the process they obscure rather than illuminate.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that Harvard is for Fortune 500 jobs, Wharton for Wall Street, Kellogg for marketing and Insead for multinational entities. There’s truth to some of it, but times change, and so do employers’ recruiting preferences. The smartest move might be to choose your business school by focusing on a very specific outcome and, assuming a good fit personally, going to the one with an impressive record of helping students achieve the same. Period.

For the first time in 14 years, the Senate on Thursday approved a revised version of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law that ushered in an era of broadly reviled, high-stakes standardized testing.

But the passage of the bill on a vote of 81 to 17, coming just a week after the House narrowly passed its own version, sets up a showdown between the two chambers, and leaves the fate of a final measure in doubt.

Both bills return some key power to local governments but differ over the role of the federal government and funding allocations.

Congress has repeatedly failed in its efforts to rewrite the law over the last several years.

At the heart of the debate between Democrats and Republicans is the appropriate role for the federal government in education programs, which are largely a function of state and local governments.

Leaders from both sides insist they can come to an agreement that can make it to President Obama’s desk.

"In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old aspiring novelist named Harper Lee — everyone called her Nelle — delivered the manuscript for “Go Set a Watchman” to her agent to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct J. B. Lippincott Company, which eventually bought it. • At Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey — known professionally as Tay Hohoff — a small, wiry veteran editor in her late 50s. Ms. Hohoff was impressed. '[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line,' she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott. • But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, 'more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.' During the next couple of years, she led Ms. Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled “To Kill a Mockingbird.” • Now, this week’s publication of “Go Set a Watchman” offers a rare glimpse at the before and after of a book widely regarded as a masterpiece. The main characters may be the same, but “Watchman” is an entirely different book in both shape and tone from “Mockingbird.” Scout is not an impressionable child in Maycomb, Ala., looking up to her heroic father, but a young woman from Maycomb living in New York. Her father, the great Atticus Finch, is a bigot."

What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do — and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.

"We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus. • Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” • In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the NAACP” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”"

"'She had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being.' • More than 55 years after readers fell under the spell of the feisty tomboy Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch in Harper Lee’s 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' the character has been resurrected — as a more mature and outwardly civilized, but still rebellious, young woman — in 'Go Set a Watchman,' an unexpected second novel by Ms. Lee. • The first chapter of the new book, which was published by The Wall Street Journal and by The Guardian on Friday, continues the story of Scout and her father, Atticus, about 20 years after the action in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” While the novel shares literary DNA with Ms. Lee’s famous debut — the same wry humor, biting banter and finely drawn characters flicker throughout — this is clearly a different story. It is narrated in the third person, from the perspective of Jean Louise (who has outgrown the nickname Scout, it seems), and the heroine, and the times, have changed. • In the opening passages, Jean Louise is in her 20s, taking a train to Alabama from New York. She is returning home to Maycomb to visit Atticus, now 72, who refuses to retire from his law practice despite his age and infirmity. • She expects Atticus to meet her at the train station, but a young man greets her instead: “He grabbed her in a bear hug, put her from him, kissed her hard on the mouth, then kissed her gently.”"

It’s easy to forget that we have access to a virtually limitless resource of information, i.e. the Internet. For a lot of us, this is even true at our fingertips, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and an ever-increasing push for online greatness by tech engineers all over the world.

As a result, there are countless websites out there that are geared to make you smarter and more brilliant for either a low or no cost. Here are just 25 killer websites that may just make you more clever than ever before.

"If you know children aged between about six and 14, then you have probably heard of Minecraft. • Minecraft is a digital game, a popular cultural phenomenon and a powerful platform for learning. It is one of the most successful digital games of all time and continues to grow in popularity. • Educators have a great interest in Minecraft because children and young people seem to be driven to learn new knowledge and skills to play the game with a passion that they often lack for their everyday schooling. • The first Minecraft in Education Summit took place this year in Los Angeles. It illustrates the seriousness with which major international universities and the technology industry are treating the game."

"HAVERHILL — On a cool June morning, Lillian Santana is in a remedial math class, stuck on a problem about negative exponents. 'I’m thinking you divide,' her classmate says. Santana isn’t sure. She whips out her iPhone, opens the calculator, and furrows her brow. CONTINUE READING BELOW The professor, circling the computer lab at Northern Essex Community College, asks if anyone needs help. The two students give in and beckon him over; seconds later, they have the answer. Santana smiles. 'I’m horrible at math, too, but I try my best.' Nearly two-thirds of all community college students and nearly a quarter of those at state universities in Massachusetts test into remedial math classes, according to a 2013 study by the state Department of Higher Education. Of those who take remedial courses, according to the data, only 1 in 5 goes on to complete a college-level math class and many never earn degrees."

'Humans are incredibly visual and powerful, moving images help us find meaning… [and] video helps capture and contextualize the world around us.' – Dan Patterson "Some of the most popular apps and social networks (Periscope, Meerkat, Vine, Instagram, Youtube, etc.) make it easy for anyone to quickly produce, publish, and share their videos. Chances are your students have already produced their own videos and shared them with the world. So why not have your students share their knowledge through video projects? Students can create video tutorials, silent films, screencasts, lip dubs, commercials, news reports, music videos, documentaries, movie trailers, video diaries, vodcasts, soap operas, stop motion films, machinimas, claymation, talk shows, and game shows. Keep reading to find many more ideas! In my digital book, Learning to Go, find editable handouts and rubrics for creating video projects. Additionally, find some ideas and tips below along with downloadable slides to get you and your studentsstarted."

"In a fast-moving field like education technology, it’s worth taking a moment to take stock of new developments, persistent trends and the challenges to effective tech implementation in real classrooms. The NMC Horizon 2015 K-12 report offers a snapshot of where ed tech stands now and where it is likely to go in the next five years, according to 56 education and technology experts from 22 countries.

"This past week I have been spending a lot of time with some really smart educators from all over the country. While the premise of this convening was the enormous edtech conference, ISTE, I spent less time talking about tech tools and awesome apps and more time talking about equity, school funding, current events and the trajectory of education in the US. • On Monday, I sat on an engrossing panel with some of my colleagues talking about project-based learning (PBL) and my friend, Tom Whitby spoke about how many teachers who are successfully implementing PBL are 6 months ahead of the current conversations in education. For some reason, that comment stuck with me and I began to reflect and think about the attendees at conferences I attend, the people who attend my sessions, the people who organize events I go to and the people who design and sell the flashy tech tools that schools adopt and use. • On both of the panels I was on the conversation moved at some point to specific apps or tools. While we made sure to focus on the whys and the hows that must come before adopting a tool, it seems that, often, people are looking for a tool or a device to be a “silver bullet” (to paraphrase Josh Stumpenhorst’s closing keynote on Wednesday.) • I began to wonder–why is it that some educators are thinking about these bigger ideas and some are not? Amanda Dykes refers to these big thinking educators as “rebels” in her most recent post. Like her, I often find myself in the crowd that asks persistent questions, that offers another side to the argument, that asks the fundamental question of “why” on a regular basis."

"Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, and colleagues created the Right Question Institute over 20 years ago as they began to develop a strategy for helping people in low-income communities learn to advocate for themselves. We interviewed him in April 2015 to ask about how necessary it is for lifelong learners to be able to develop and ask the 'right questions.' (Interview posted: April 21, 2015) • Dan and Luz's work was inspired by an insight from parents in one community who identified the importance of 'knowing what to ask' as a key skill for being able to help oneself, one’s family, and one's community."

This year, 75.3 million millennials, born 1981 to 1997, will inch out boomers as the largest generation, according to Pew Research Center calculations. In five years, they’ll be nearly half the work force.

There’s no shortage of stereotypes (narcissistic, entitled) for Gen Y.

But Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, prefers to show generational differences statistically, merging survey data in her newly updated 2006 book, “Generation Me.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to his native Baltimore on July 15, 2015, to discuss and sign his newly-released book on race, Between the World and Me. The book, presented as a letter written to his adolescent son, engages with a wide range of topics relating to the black experience in America. Coates reads a passage from the book and later fields questions from the audience.

"No one knows how much knowledge students take home with them after a day at school. Tests, homework and inspections give a snapshot of learning but ultimately it’s something that you cannot see; it’s invisible and personal. • The educational researcher Graham Nuthall spent 40 years trying to understand how we learn. He wired classrooms in New Zealand for sound, installed video cameras, sat in on lessons and interviewed hundreds of students. But despite crunching mountains of data, he was not able to draw any conclusions. • In recent years, a new field of enquiry has burst onto the scene with the hope of finally unlocking the secret of how learning takes place. It’s been referred to as educational neuroscience, neuroeducation and mind, brain and education."

Well, we asked, and the answer was shocking: 72% of girls DO feel society limits them – especially during puberty – a time when their confidence totally plummets. Always is on an epic battle to keep girls’ confidence high during puberty and beyond!

Our original #LikeAGirl social experiment started a conversation to boost confidence by changing the meaning of “like a girl” from an insult to a total compliment. And – with your help – that conversation turned into major movement sweeping the entire globe.

We’re on a roll, and we’re not stopping! Now, we’re empowering girls everywhere by encouraging them to smash limitations and be Unstoppable #LikeAGirl. We need your help. Join us. Watch, share and champion all girls to be Unstoppable #LikeAGirl.

For more than three decades, we’ve made it our mission to empower young girls worldwide by educating millions of them about puberty and their cycle, so they can feel confident – any day of the month. Together, we’re making great change happen. Don’t stop!

"The Indian Supreme Court recently ordered 600,000 students to re-appear for a test after reports of large-scale cheating. • Cheating during exams is illegal in India, but it is still widespread. • In recent years those wanting a helping hand have been able to take advantage of modern technology and a whole market in devices to aid cheats has sprung up."

"An exclusive extract from the new novel by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, published on 14 July" "Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose. • Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair. • She was glad she had decided to go by train. Trains had changed since her childhood, and the novelty of the experience amused her: a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on. She resolved not to be intimidated by several messages stenciled around her compartment – a roomette, they called it – but when she went to bed the night before, she succeeded in folding herself up into the wall because she had ignored an injunction to PULL THIS LEVER DOWN OVER BRACKETS, a situation remedied by the porter to her embarrassment, as her habit was to sleep only in pajama tops."

"Excessive use of computer games among young people in China appears to be taking an alarming turn and may have particular relevance for American parents whose children spend many hours a day focused on electronic screens. The documentary “Web Junkie,” to be shown next Monday on PBS, highlights the tragic effects on teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing for dozens of hours at a time often without breaks to eat, sleep or even use the bathroom. Many come to view the real world as fake. • Chinese doctors consider this phenomenon a clinical disorder and have established rehabilitation centers where afflicted youngsters are confined for months of sometimes draconian therapy, completely isolated from all media, the effectiveness of which remains to be demonstrated. • While Internet addiction is not yet considered a clinical diagnosis here, there’s no question that American youths are plugged in and tuned out of “live” action for many more hours of the day than experts consider healthy for normal development. And it starts early, often with preverbal toddlers handed their parents’ cellphones and tablets to entertain themselves when they should be observing the world around them and interacting with their caregivers."

"The public schools are losing well-qualified and experienced teachers who have made a commitment to our communities and dedicated themselves to teaching our children and and yet we are losing them in large numbers. Why? • There are many reasons but for the most part is has to do with the phrase “Education Reform”. • The term encompasses charter schools and who teaches in those schools, the Common Core Standards, high stakes standardized testing, as well as the failed idea of merit pay for teachers. • Charter schools are privately run and just like any other business, the owner/CEO and board of directors want to keep costs down and profits up. One place to save is with labor costs and with charter schools, that means teachers. There are two approaches to this that charter school owners have taken, either hire Teach for America, Inc.recruits with five weeks of training and pay them low wages with a promise of at least something to put on their resumes after their two year stint and/or implement what they like to call “blended learning” or “personalized learning environments.” which means placing a student in front of a computer rather than a teacher to receive whatever education they can."

"Embedding videos, photos, or other types of content in your blog posts is a relatively simple way to enhance your posts with informative, attention-grabbing content. In this round up post, we’ll share posts from the Edublogs community (and beyond) explaining how to embed just about anything into your blog! • Use Just A Simple Link • We’ll begin with an Edublogger post from last year — Blogging Tip: Embed Content With Just A URL. This post will explain how to embed content from a number of well know content and social media platforms directly into your blog using nothing but a simple URL. It really is just that easy!"

"PHILADELPHIA — The use of blended learning in schools has increased the adoption of educational technology as the public has grown fond of online learning, according to a new report. • A closely-watched report that provides insight into digital learning trends – both in and out of school settings — named blended learning as a key topic to watch in the next two years. • The annual New Media Consortium Horizon Report’s K-12 2015 Edition was released Monday at the ISTE 2015 conference in Philadelphia, a conference devoted to educational technology that’s expected to draw about 18,000 attendees. The trends included in the report were selected by 56 experts from 22 countries, and they collaborate online to discuss the topics on a public website. • 'There is a very strong description of blended learning [in the report],' said Matt Harris, of the British School Jarkarta in Indonesia, the chair-elect of the ISTE board. 'And it’s something you will find all over this conference.”"

"Let’s start out in a rather unconventional way. • Just in case you aren’t familiar, the title of this post is a play on the popular children’s book, If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff. • Even though the original wasn’t a rhyme, once we got going, we just couldn’t stop. --- Here goes… • If you give a student a website, at first, he isn’t going to be sure what to do. • He will start by wanting to decorate it and personalize it too. • He’ll no doubt choose some interesting colors and flashing widgets – making sure he has the most.

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